Category: Human Scale Economics

We want a future characterized by freedom from tyranny and deprivation. We want a future characterized by open access to education and empowerment. These wants are also needs, if we are to build a human civilization capable of the flexibility and resilience required to outlast the risks that flow from our own frailties. The metaphysical structures we call institutions have developed over long centuries fraught with scarcity, conflict, injustice and the reaction to injustice. We know this, and we let ourselves forget it. So, it is worth remembering: we are always, in subtle and deliberate ways, striving to free ourselves from the inefficiency of rigid institutions that ignore human need and the nuance of life as it happens at the human scale.

We can design the future we want. We can design institutions that “know” how to receive, to sift through, to leverage, and to be enhanced by waves of change. Knowledge is a constellation. The knowledge in your own mind is a constellation, but the constellation of all that is known extends to all human minds, and to all that we use to document what we perceive and comprehend. That constellation of knowledge relationships is also a map of the future, though we don’t yet know with perfect clarity which elements we will inhabit and which we will escape.Continue reading “Freedom from Tyranny: Redefined”

Historically, when observers to the Bretton Woods institutions would raise issues of macrocritical value distortion, they were generally told “That’s not our business.” The common practice was to treat environmental damage, the degradation of basic rights, limited access to education, as “unquantifiables” or as “social issues”. IMF leadership would refer to the founding mission as dealing exclusively with the health or unhealth of fiscal math in a given country—its budgetary solvency. At the World Bank, the mission of ending poverty was not seen as directly linked to the building of basic civic and economic infrastructure required for sustained human development.

So, for a long time, macrocritical considerations would make their way into analysis and reports, but global economic leaders went on about their business without worrying too much about environmental impacts, gender inequality, or systemic multi-directional feedback loops like the climate system.

In the Paris Agreement, 195 nations acknowledge “that climate change is a common concern of humankind,” and agree to “respect, promote and consider their respective obligations on … intergenerational equity.” Intergenerational equity refers to the ethical principle that we should not discount the cost of harm when it falls on future generations. A number of other broad, basic, and also pragmatic ethical principles accompany intergenerational equity as the foundation for both national and international climate action, but it is necessary to take a moment and absorb the significance of this particular element of the world’s first universal agreement on climate action. That intergenerational equity should be a principle guiding how governments plan for and respond to climate disruption suggests a new baseline for international law: actions that project harm and degradation into the future must be avoided.

The ACCESS to GOOD Project is an open, collaborative, ongoing reporting process, aiming to identify observable levers of action for adding value, momentum, and scope to investments in climate action and resilient human development.

ACCESS is a framework for analyzing the level of progress on comprehensive climate action. The axis standard aims to measure six qualifications of public policy, investment prioritization and business action:

Aspiration

Collaboration

Climate

Energy

Sustenance

Security

GOOD is a framework for analyzing the generative tendencies, inclucing community-building reinforcements and local value added of day to day economic activity, at the human scale. This analysis operates on the premise that all economic behavior has at its roots a basic and specific demand for generative optimizing capabilities operating organically through routine human behavior.

We are constantly making decisions about the world. We don’t think of them as decisions. Instead, we tend to feel the world has imposed on us a situation, which we may or may not need to accept. We feel the decision like an open question, and we sit in judgment. Is it a good world, a bad world, a dangerous, or a loving place? These qualifications flow from our experience, our foresight, our fears, our aims and our human connections. The question of whether we are grateful to be part of this world seems to be reserved for special occasions. But whether we live with a sense of gratitude and wonder determines how and to what extent we value the details of our existence that make it worth the struggle. And that can determine to what extent we know how to make it worth the struggle.

The poet Jane Kenyon was known for her mastery of the style known as “the luminous particular”. The phrase is a reference to imagery, expression and ideas, that ground us in the local, personal, intimate, in ways that illuminate our experience of existence and of truth. She can define the undefined by writing that happiness “comes to the woman sweeping the street / with a birch broom”, “to the boulder in the perpetual shade of pine barrens”, or “to rain falling on the open sea…” Her excellence in bringing the reader into the intimate space of detail informs my own thinking about writing, meaning, and what we value and how.

The particular is what we tend to find most luminous, but our political language is full of the assumption that the opposite is true and correct. This often leads to conflict between what we talk about and what we value.

An idea whose time has come

In 2010, when Citizens’ Climate Lobby brought 25 citizen volunteers to Capitol Hill, it felt like a big challenge to get enough people to go the distance, to meet with all 535 voting members of Congress. This year, we brought 36 times as many people, and it is looking more like we will need more elected officials to welcome and build relationships with all the citizen lobbyists coming to make democracy work.

The 2015 CCL International Conference brought a record number of citizen volunteer lobbyists together—more than 900—to have real policy discussions with elected officials. It was a breakthrough year in a lot of ways:

For the first time, we had more people attending than could reasonably fit into the meetings we had scheduled.

We had nearly three times as many volunteers to role-play members of Congress in our basic training than we had volunteers total in our first conference.

We heard from not one but two great scientists who have been named to TIME Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people on Earth.

We were joined by dozens of faith leaders, who came to support this message of enhanced civics and substantive policy for a livable world.